The Meq (53 page)

I entered the living room through the kitchen and Opari and Geaxi were waiting for me. It was more evening than afternoon, but they were just waking up. I envied their yawns and puffy eyes.

“What was that noise?” Opari asked.

“A milk truck,” I said, then told her what had happened and why. Opari disagreed vehemently with Daphne’s conclusion, insisting that they were much safer where they were and should not have left. I told her we were stuck; it was too late. We would have to wait for Willie’s return before anything could be changed.

I felt I was in a kind of trance. I looked at Geaxi and watched her folding her blanket and placing it neatly in a corner chair. She was unnaturally quiet. Opari walked over and touched my temples with her fingertips, making featherlight circles and then kissing the places she had touched.

“You are
nekagarri,
my love.”

“Yes . . . I am.”

“Come,” Geaxi said suddenly. “We will lose all light if we do not leave now.”

“I want you to sleep,” Opari told me. “Geaxi is taking me somewhere, somewhere she wants to go, somewhere on this land. You must sleep while we are away, Z. You must sleep and dream deeply if you can.”

I glanced at Geaxi and she was ignoring me, preparing to leave.

“Will you do this? Please?” Opari asked.

“I will do this. I promise.”

Geaxi tossed a heavy coat and wool cap over to Opari. She put her own beret in place and started toward the door, then stopped and looked at me. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other since Eder had died. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I chose silence and hoped she was all right. Then she began to laugh—hard—as if she couldn’t help it. It wasn’t cynical, bitter, hollow, angry, or anything else. It was just a laugh and when Opari joined in I knew it was on me.

“Someday, Zezen,” Geaxi said, “you must teach me to play.”

It was then that I realized I still had Mama’s glove on my hand. I pounded my fist in the pocket and joined in the laughter. “I will,” I told her. “I will do this.”

Geaxi reached in the pocket of her vest and removed a simple gold ring. It was slightly scratched and big enough to be a man’s ring. Without her saying so, I knew whose it was. She had slipped it off his finger the night before while we were wrapping the body. She gave it to me without a word, then turned and opened the door for Opari.

“Now or never,” she said.

They were through the door and disappearing up a path heading north within minutes. From a distance they looked a little like two schoolgirls out for a walk in the country, followed by a few stray cats. They were each and all anything but that.

For a few moments, I stood there with Mama’s glove on one hand and Nicholas’s wedding ring between the thumb and forefinger of the other. Silent, inanimate, haunting—they were only things, things made by hand and fashioned to fit another hand for a simple, specific purpose, and yet, what lives they had led; what secrets, dreams, fears, and hopes they held just because they were made and given to another. I slipped the ring over my thumb, the only digit that would hold it, and threw Mama’s glove on the big couch in front of the fireplace. I put a few logs on the dying fire and fell back on the couch, stretching out and using Mama’s glove as a pillow. The fire caught quickly and the flames looked like birds taking flight. I watched and wondered at what I knew and what I didn’t. I turned the ring around and around and around and fell asleep.

I slept for what felt like only seconds, then woke to discover I’d been out for hours. The fire had burned down to embers and the whole house was dark and empty. I listened for anyone moving and heard nothing, then sat up and listened deeper, using my “ability.” I could only hear the wind swirling outside and the old house straining against it.

Suddenly the hair stood up on my arms and I shivered from head to foot. It happened again, then again and again, like waves, until I had to shout out loud to make it stop. I was not frightened—the Meq cannot afford superstition—and I was not cold. Still, something or someone had made the hair stand up on my arms.

I went to the fireplace and stirred the embers, adding new logs and waiting for the flames to catch. I felt off balance, out of breath, and something else I couldn’t quite define. I knew I was awake, but everything seemed to be taking place in a slightly altered state and time—a dream time.

Then, far away and barely audible, I heard the sound of tires on gravel, the sound of someone turning down the drive into Caitlin’s Ruby and approaching the house.

I started to move toward the door and found I couldn’t do it without tremendous effort. My legs and feet seemed long and thick, my hands and fingers useless and unnecessary. I tried to think and couldn’t concentrate on any line of thought or single image. I wasn’t spinning, but I felt weightless and weighed down at the same time, as if I would begin to spin, if I only knew how.

The fire popped and cracked and the new wood began to catch. It sent shafts of light across the room and cast shadows of the furniture on the walls and windows. The shadows became dangerous cliffs on a dark coastline and I was being drawn toward them. I was adrift at sea and I was going to crash for certain. The cliffs danced and beckoned. I knew it wasn’t real, but I was losing all perspective. One reality was slipping easily into the other and I didn’t know which was which or even care. I was weightless, inside and out. A beam of light swept back and forth across the cliffs or the walls, I couldn’t decide, and the lighthouse kept moving and coming closer. I could also hear it and it sounded like a car, but that didn’t make sense at sea, or did it? I couldn’t decide and it was so hard to think.

It was then I heard the cats. In slow motion, I turned toward the sound and there were six of them on a window ledge, outlined clearly by the beam of light and staring in at me. I heard a door slam on the lighthouse, the car, the house—I couldn’t decide and all sounds had an echo and the echoes all had different origins.

I heard a voice repeating something. It was a woman’s voice and she seemed to be shouting, “Is me own home! Is me own home!”

I closed my eyes and tried to find what was real and what was not. I knew I was fatigued, but that didn’t explain what was happening. Where was the voice? Whose voice was it?

I heard another door open and a gust of wind followed the sound and brushed across my face. I opened my eyes and a woman in a red cape with a hood pulled over her head stood in the doorway between the shadows of the cliffs and coastline.

“Is anyone—” she started, then stopped when she saw me. She took another step inside the room. “Home,” she said flatly, then added, “Z, is that you?”

I couldn’t see her face clearly inside the red cape and hood, and I knew it made no sense whatsoever and probably proved me insane, but my first thought and explanation for what I saw was that she could only be one person—and that person had died long ago.

“Caitlin?” I asked in a whisper. “Caitlin Fadle?”

The woman slowly pulled the hood down from her head with one hand and unbuttoned her cape with the other.

“No,” she said, taking another step toward me. The firelight framed her face and I knew in an instant why I’d felt that first shiver. “It’s me, Z,” she said. “It’s Carolina.”

There is no word in English, Meq, Basque, or any other language I know that can describe the feeling, the sensation, relief, warmth, surprise—the utter and infinite dumb joy I felt at that moment. Life has only a few moments that can stop the heart and empty the mind. Perhaps that’s why there is no name for them. I only know I couldn’t speak and could barely stand, so I sat down right where I was and stared up at her, and for the first time in years, I felt exactly like the child I appeared to be.

“Is it true?” she asked before I’d said a word. “Have you found her, Z? Have you really found Star?”

She spread her cape on the floor beside me and sat down cross-legged. She wore borrowed clothes—a man’s sweater and trousers, and some kind of all-weather boots that were coming undone. In the center of the red cape was a red cross on a white background. It was the symbol for the International Red Cross Society and explained her cape, but not the rest of it.

I watched her adjust her sweater and run her hands through her hair. She was eighteen years older, in her late forties, and the years had not changed her beauty, they had only made it sharper and more permanent. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of winter wheat, with a few strands of silver among the gold, and the gold flecks in her blue eyes literally danced in the firelight. There were lines and creases around her mouth and eyes, and even they seemed sculpted and natural. She picked up one of my hands, keeping her eyes on mine, and held it gently between hers. I had not yet said a word. I glanced at her hands and after eighteen years and a thousand scenarios played out in my mind of what I would say to her, all I said was, “Freckles.”

She looked down, puzzled at first, asking “What?” Then she looked up and began to laugh, saying, “Yes, yes, yes, they’re everywhere. I’ve got families of them now, Z. You should see them, they’re everywhere.”

“Carolina, how did—”

She cut me off and put her fingers to my lips. “Shhh,” she said. “You must tell me, Z, is it true? Have you found Star?”

“Yes, but—”

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it was true. I told Owen I knew it was true the minute we heard. I told him, I’m going to meet them, I’m going over there.”

“Carolina—”

“Just a minute, Z. I want to tell you first that I am still angry about you and Ray leaving the way you did. You promised me—”

“I promised you I would find her.”

“But you never wrote or wired or anything, not a clue . . . not to me, anyway.”

“It’s complicated.”

She put her hand to her face and rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted and pushing herself to the brink. “Where is she, Z?”

I reached behind me and pulled Mama’s glove off the couch and handed it to her. She smiled and held it close to her face and was about to say something, then opened her eyes in surprise and started to cry. I knew she was sensing Star’s presence, touch, scent . . . something. Anyway, I’m not sure there is a name for that feeling either.

With more hope than truth, I said, “She’ll be back soon.”

“Oh, God, Z, can it be true, finally? So much has been lost. So much time and . . . so many other things.” Carolina exhaled and drew in a breath slowly, trying to gather herself, then suddenly sneezed violently several times, almost uncontrollably.

I panicked. “You’re not sick, are you?”

“No, no,” she said, wiping her nose and eyes with her sweater. “It’s those damn cats outside. How many are there?”

I laughed and reached for Mama’s glove and she stopped me, grabbing my hand and turning it over until my thumb stood upright. I’d forgotten about the ring.

Her face went blank and her eyes glazed over. She slipped the ring off my thumb and held it in her palm, staring down on it as if it were the most curious and precious thing on earth. Then she closed her eyes and made a fist around the ring, holding it so tight her knuckles showed white through her skin.

“What happened?” she whispered.

“He was in St. Louis, at the house, at the moment Sailor’s message arrived. He . . . he had to come . . . he wouldn’t wait. He must have caught this strange virus on the way. He got here before us. He was sick, no, they were sick—”

“They?”

“Nova and Eder were with him.”

“They were all sick?”

“No. It is impossible for Nova to get sick . . . remember? It was Eder.”

We stared at each other in silence, then the tears started down over her freckles and I couldn’t stop them. I watched them drop and fall off her chin as they ran their course, gravity pulling them on, forcing them downward through space until they hit the ancient hearthstones in front of us, in front of the fire. All the new wood I’d tossed in earlier had caught and the fire was blazing. The tears didn’t last a second on the hearthstones, and each one disappeared faster than it had taken to fall.

“My God, Z,” Carolina said. “My God.”

Death is a mad seamstress, a drunken messenger with no plan or sense of order—no pattern. Life is nothing but patterns and patterns are everywhere where in life, or seem to be. Geaxi finds them everywhere; rock gardens are her favorite because the patterns are oblique and subjective, but ultimately she pays them little mind. Sailor thinks they are absolutely essential and depends on them as he would wind and waves. Opari finds them darkly mysterious and yet useful—the trick, she says, is in discovering their interconnectedness, their weave.

Death is different. It has no pattern, no weave, no design. Death can go where it wants.

I propped pillows up against the couch and pulled all the blankets around us. Carolina lay with her head in my lap and held my hand next to her cheek. If there had been people outside instead of Caitlin’s cats staring in at us, they might have thought they were seeing something very odd—the grandmother in the lap of the grandson perhaps—but it was never that way for us. It never had been that way and never would.

I asked if she wanted to sleep and she said, “Not now, not yet.” We watched the fire and talked. She wanted to know everything about Star and I told her everything I knew, leaving out some of what I’d seen in New Orleans. When I told her she really was a grandmother, I thought her response would be wild and exuberant, but she only held my hand tighter and quietly said, “Good.”